At the MFA: John Singer Sargent's watercolor dreams

Sunday

Oct 13, 2013 at 12:01 AMOct 13, 2013 at 1:12 PM

John Singer Sargent's watercolors transports us to new realms and enflames the imagination.

Chris Bergeron/Daily News staff

After earning international fame as a portraitist, John Singer Sargent reinvigorated his career in middle age, devoting himself to watercolors with the passion of a neophyte learning to see the world anew.

Around 1900 the expatriate artist, who’d spent years painting English aristocrats and American swells, shed the strictures of prevailing artistic convention to embrace the freedom of vivid colors, fresh subjects and energetic brushwork as a watercolorist for the new century.

The reborn artist emerges with revelatory brilliance in "John Singer Sargent Watercolors,’’ a landmark exhibition at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston.

Visitors will see 92 luminous scenes, landscapes and figures that seem to have been painted with incandescent colors.

Born in 1856 to American parents living in Italy, Sargent was a rambunctious and precocious child who learned to draw and paint from his parents who were accomplished artists and illustrators.

Fluent in four languages, he studied at the prestigious Ecole des Beaux-Arts in France and earned prizes but remained open to new approaches that encouraged spontaneous use of color characteristic of his best work.

Throughout the 1880s and 1890s, Sargent painted hundreds of portraits, earning recognition for his ability to convey his subjects’ character often with unusual backgrounds or lighting.

While Sargent’s name evokes for many Bostonians and Bay Staters signature paintings like "Portrait of Madame X’’ and "The Daughters of Edward Darley Bolt,’’ these watercolors will transport them to less familiar realms such as Bedouin camps, private gardens in Venice and the Swiss Alps.

A superior craftsman blessed with a gift for drawing with his brush, Sargent imbued his watercolors with a dream-like intensity and richness of color alive as if glimpsed in the bright Mediterranean sunlight.

The bustle and beauty of life along a Venetian canal comes alive in the lambent tints of "Santa Maria della Salute," a gondolier eye-level view of travelers and ladies in shawls and wide-brimmed hats disembarking for the Catholic church and basilica along the Grand Canal. The largest canvas from one of Sargent’s two American watercolor shows, it must have been special for him as it’s the only one that’s both dated and signed.

Just a year or two later, during a five-month journey through Jerusalem, Beirut and present-day Syria, Sargent painted "Bedouins,’’ a twin portrait of men whose faces are partially hidden by their head scarves that accurately depicts nomadic desert dwellers as dignified individuals while also evoking them as figures of mystery.

While the two women in white shawls in "Simplon Pass: Reading’’ appear to be casually relaxing beneath their parasols, a surviving photo reveals Sargent as a master of planned composition who posed some of his favorite models, Dorothy Barnard and his niece, Rose Marie Ormond, in postures to capture the wondrous mix of their white clothes and tinted shadows.

It is this year’s "can’t miss’’ museum exhibition for several reasons.

Through these vivid watercolors, visitors will encounter a different Sargent from the one they thought they knew, a consummate craftsman, self-liberated to create, in the words of MFA Director Malcolm Rogers, "the most intimate and personal works of his career.’’

Organized by Erica Hirshler, of the MFA, and Teresa Carbone, of the Brooklyn Museum, this landmark exhibit combines galleries full of lovely paintings, groundbreaking scholarship and the inspiring story of an artist who took a bold step that paid off with enduring works.

"These watercolors are full of joy and freedom,’’ said Hirshler, senior curator of American paintings, Art of the Americas. "They show an artist recreating himself for a new century, rediscovering his creativity and his passion for making works of art.’’

This exhibit features an audio tour narrated by Hirshler, Rogers and Sargent’s grand-nephew Richard Ormond that provides an extremely informative historical context and fascinating details about individual works.

The current show represents a historic reunion of earlier landmark exhibitions when Sargent displayed his watercolors for only two times in the U.S. during his lifetime in 1909 and 1912 in New York and Boston.

The Brooklyn Museum bought the contents of the first highly praised show and the MFA bought all the works for the second show before it opened.

For the first time, the current exhibition unites work Sargent selected to represent his best watercolors.

At a time "accessible art’’ is a dirty word for culture snobs, "John Singer Sargent Watercolors’’ should satisfy both highfaluting fans of Damien Hirst and folks who like Frederick Remington and just about everybody in between.

After working several years to organize the show, Hirschler said the "most fun’’ and scholarly reward came from documenting "a new aspect of Sargent’s work as he reinvented himself’’ as a watercolorist of stunning originality and power.

Observing that Sargent was an accomplished pianist, she said his "hand and eye seemed connected’’ in ways that "can’t be learned’’ to create art of distinctive beauty.

"Sargent had an ability to capture scenes with such effectiveness,’’ she said.

During the opening tour, Hirshler enthused over "Corfu: Lights and Shadows’’ as "such a non-subject that Sargent made into a work of art.’’

After visiting the Greek island around 1909, he captured the dance of light and shadow across the stucco wall of a nondescript building with such delicacy that Hirschler said the finished work allows viewers "to see sunlight captured and held.’’

"Sargent has painted the highlights and shadows,’’ she said, "and left the form to take shape in your imaginations.’’

Chris Bergeron is a Daily News staff writer. Contact him at cbergeron@wickedlocal.com or 508-626-4448. Follow us on Twitter @WickedLocalArts and on Facebook.